Online Video Ad Viewers Watched an Average of Almost 100 Ads Each in May

Americans who watched video ads in May seemed to have watched a whole lot of them, according to the latest Video Metrix figures from comScore. The data reveals that about 53% of the US population watched online video ads in May, relatively unchanged from April’s 52.6%. But in May, those Americans watched an average of 96.5 ads each, up significantly from 81.6 the prior month. Back in January, the US population reached by online video ads viewed them slightly more than 58 times during the month.

The big jump in video ad frequency in May meant that total online video ads views catapulted past their April record by about 2.5 billion views to reach a new high of 15.8 billion views. Google took a backseat to BrightRoll in the May video ad property rankings, with the latter serving up a new high of more than 2.6 billion ads. Google set another high for itself, with more than 2.5 billion video ads of its own. In May, 7 properties served more than 1 billion ads, with 4 crossing the 2 billion mark.

During the month, video ads accounted for 27.9% of all online videos viewed (up from 25.5% in April), and 2.6% of all minutes spent viewing online video (up from 2.3%).

Overall, 84.8% of online Americans (182.2 million) watched almost 41 billion online content videos in May. The duration of the average content video was 5.6 minutes, with the average online video ad lasting 24 seconds. Both of those remained unchanged from the previous month.

Google Sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, remained the top online video content property with 154.5 million unique viewers, relatively unchanged from April. Facebook was next with 60.4 million (down from 62.7 million), while AOL leapt a few places into the 3rd spot (53.8 million). VEVO (52 million) and NDN (46.5 million) rounded out the top 5.

Other Findings:

Google Sites generated the largest amount of video views (14 billion), while Facebook ended its streak of records, finishing with 727.4 million after reaching almost 741 million in April.

Hulu delivered the highest frequency of video ads to viewers again, this time at 71.3, up from 61.

VEVO retained its top spot in the YouTube partner rankings, followed by FullScreen and Maker Studios.